The Difference Between Plagiarism And Copyright Infringement

Law Schools Team Up To Help Developers Fight Patent Trolls

from the good-news dept

Wed, Oct 9th 2013 7:01pm — Mike Masnick

Over the last few years it's been great to see a number of useful law school clinics pop up, focused on taking on key issues of our modern era. While law clinics have been around for a while, those focused on issues raised by technological change and innovation are quite useful. We've seen things like the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at Berkeley, the Online Media Legal Network at Harvard, the Brooklyn Law Incubator and Policy Clinic and a number of others popping up. However, most of these have been focused on copyright and free speech issues. There really hadn't been that much done on the patent front that we can recall.

So it's exciting to see a bunch of law schools teaming up with the App Developers Alliance (full disclosure: they have been, and continue to be, a sponsor for Techdirt) to launch the Law School Patent Troll Defense Network. It's bringing together a variety of existing law school clinics, including Brooklyn Law School, American University, NYU Law, USC and more, to help app developers and small businesses fight off patent trolls. This is a big deal since trolls have increasingly been targeting these guys. We've covered, for example the lawsuits by Lodsys, which seems to take great joy in shaking down app developers with highly questionable patent threats.

The biggest issue with these shakedown attempts, which pretty much everyone recognizes, is that the cost of "settling" is much, much cheaper than the cost of fighting, even if the patent claim is ridiculous. And, much of that "cost" is in paying for lawyers. There are some lawyers willing to take cases on a pro bono setup, but that's much rarer when it comes to patent disputes, which are generally seen as "corporate" disputes, rather than directly impacting individuals (even though many small businesses and app developers really are just a single person). So, the setup here will allow app developers who have been threatened to work with the network to try to find law clinics willing to help out and defend against bogus threats from patent trolls.

While there are huge structural problems with the patent system that need to be fixed, in the short term, lowering the potential liability and burden for a company hit with a threatening shakedown letter from a patent troll can be very helpful in avoiding having companies just rolling over and paying up.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: clinics, developers, law schools, patent trolls, patents, pro bono
Companies: application developers alliance

8 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Anonymous Coward, 9 Oct 2013 @ 8:31pm

We need more of these everywhere in the world.

Create the network necessary to effectively slow and hopefully halt all of these abuses of the law everywhere.

We also need others to find political(law drafting), non-legal (tech and operational alternatives to bypass incumbered areas) and resources management systems/approaches/collection.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
gyffes, 9 Oct 2013 @ 9:33pm

NOOOOOOOOO!
This is just some cruel trick to make it SLIGHTLY less difficult for me to loathe lawyers (is the galactic "shoot on sight" authorization still in effect?)!

WAAAH!

Heeey, wait, OOTB, isn't a lawyer, is it?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 9 Oct 2013 @ 10:18pm

Re:
the work to slow this abuse needs to be done in the US, its these Patent Trolls using the weakness in the US patent system, its the US corporate lobbyists driving US Trade policy around the world, this monoplist blight on free trade is driven by sectional interests inside the US.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 9 Oct 2013 @ 10:33pm

Re: Re:
Sorry that most probably is not the case.

a) Patent trolls are a global phenomenon.
b) You don't take a strong opponent head on, you surround it, get some law elsewhere and point to it as success, do you recognize the tactic?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Zem, 10 Oct 2013 @ 12:01am

Re: NOOOOOOOOO!
It's OK, they are still students and have yet turned to the dark side.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Capt ICE Enforcer, 10 Oct 2013 @ 3:12am

Jobs created.
Well shit, I guess I had it wrong this whole time. Patents are great, after all, lawyers are now able to change their business model to target small businesses. Lawyers rejoice.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Bengie, 10 Oct 2013 @ 6:24am

Re:
Or get rid of patents. The best and most useful of inventions are made in spite of patents not because of them.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
rubic, 10 Oct 2013 @ 9:52pm

Re: Re:
"The best and most useful of inventions are made in spite of patents not because of them."

Really? Can you point to something that says this is so?
[ link to this | view in thread ]